John William North spent much of the 1860’s working at Halsway Manor, near Crowcombe in Somerset, where he had rented rooms alongside Fred Walker. This watercolour is likely to depict a scene in the Quantock Hills and the surrounding West Somerset countryside, an area which accounted for almost all of North’s landscape subjects in the 1860’s. This was a period during which North began to achieve a measure of both financial success as an illustrator, but by 1867 – the date of the present sheet – he seems to have given up his illustration work in favour of a full-time career as a landscape watercolourist and, occasionally, painter. As Christopher Newall has noted, ‘The watercolours that North painted in the 1860s owe much to his experience as a designer of illustrations, retaining a coherent and linear compositional structure, matched with intense colour and careful observation of detail.’